Ending the homeless in Santa Monica

Updated 2/2/2010 to remove copyrighted material (a letter to the editor) per request of the Santa Monica Daily Press and to expand upon my original response to the letter.

The Santa Monica Daily Press is a local freebie paper which does original reporting leavened with some local columnists, the occasional AP story and an active letters page. Homelessness and the fallout thereform is among the staple topics for letter writers. As I have a personal interest in the subject, I’m taking a break from my own current staple—Obama-bashing—to reproduce the most recent quote from and respond to a SMDP letter on the subject from a Santa Monican named Michael B-. You can find his letter on page 4 in the PDF edition of the July 9, 2008 Daily Press.

Full disclosure: Mr. B- is threatening to take legal action against me because he thinks that my original response to his letter, which you’ll find at the end of this post, constitutes libel, so I’m even less inclined to cut him any slack for his remarks about homeless people and how to resolve their situations than I was when I read his letter and responded to it nearly two years ago.

B-’s primary concern is the impact of homelessness on tourism. He says that “Europeans are appalled by these people on the street,” and asks why tourists would want to return to the city after encountering a screaming crazy lady or “a smelly guy … talking to an invisible person.”

As it happens, I’ve had first-hand experience with European reactions to the presence of the homeless on Santa Monica’s streets. I was sitting at a bus stop one restless night, having a desultory conversation with a homeless woman of my acquaintance when a couple of turned-around and tipsy young Germans wandered over and asked for directions. I didn’t know the city that well so my companion helped them out.

They chatted for a few minutes and then the men asked her what she and her belongings were doing at a bus stop at a relatively chilly three in the morning. And she told them. And they were, indeed, appalled—that the richest country in the world can’t take better care of its own. So they bought her two nights in their hotel.

Of course this particular woman wasn’t screaming or smelly, so that encounter doesn’t really address B-’s point. But I’ve spent a fair amount of time in downtown Santa Monica and Palisades Park, and have seen obvious tourists react to variously disheveled homeless people in pretty much the way most people do, which is to regard them as part of the urban landscape. Homelessness isn’t unique to the US; European countries with their more robust social safety nets are generally better equipped to deal with the problem, or to forestall it, but there’s a shortage of what the British call ‘social housing’ everywhere, and there’s never any shortage of people ill-equipped to cope with life.

Sometimes encounters with those people can be unpleasant, but at least in my experience, they rarely rise to a level that would completely sour someone on Santa Monica. I’ve been the target, for instance, of an extraordinarily aggressive panhandler, one who simply wouldn’t get out of my way—I tried to go around him on the sidewalk and he simply moved in front of me no matter which way I went. It was actually a very graceful performance on his part, but it was also somewhat threatening because he was in my space and he wouldn’t get out of it. I finally had to physically move him to the edge of the sidewalk and tell him to leave me alone, at which point he gave up.

But that was the guy, not Santa Monica. Where there are streets, there there are annoyances. People who want completely sanitized vacation experiences go to Disneyland. People who go elsewhere will not, for the most part, let a few human blemishes on the landscape or an unpleasant two-minute encounter with a homeless person ruin their vacation. I’ve been hanging around Santa Monica for going on two years now and have yet to see a tourist family fleeing the scene.

“[A] person that commits a petty crime, say, sleeping on the sidewalk will be more likely to then try and commit a more serious crime later in the day, such as robbery, assault and yes, even murder.” That’s B- again. Having established that homeless people are perhaps fatally degrading the tourist trade, he’s now making the case that homelessness is a gateway crime, that after we peel ourselves off the sidewalk, we’re going to rob, mug and murder whoever is ill-fated enough to cross our paths.

In fact, homeless people are far, far more likely to be the victims of violent crimes than the perpetrators of them. More fundamentally, though, the comment lays bare the notion that misfortune itself is a crime. You cannot be both law-abiding and homeless; if you’re living on the street, at some point during your day you’re violating one ordinance or another; you’re committing those petty crimes that B- says will lead to major ones. You’re a criminal the moment you walk out your own door for the last time.

To be fair, it’s not just homeless people who draw the man’s ire. He’s not fond of teenagers and entertainers either. He says that Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade “mostly attracts groups of teenagers with nothing better to do but wander around. Then the street performers and the crowds attract transients.” Does this guy like anyone other than European tourists?

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Here’s my original response to the B- letter:

To the editor:

I’m writing to applaud Michael B- for his letter on Santa Monica’s homeless problem (“Throw ‘em out”, July 9). Being homeless myself, and in full accord with the notion that homelessness should be confined to communities less prosperous and attractive than Santa Monica, I feel duty-bound to offer my expertise. While B-’s idea of an escalating program of harassment culminating in jail time for mentally ill homeless people—his “smelly guy … talking to an invisible person”—may sound like good fun, in practice it’s not very effective. Homeless people, like stray kittens, generally return to the last place we got a good meal. Starving us might work, but the European tourists B- says are horrified by live homeless people might be almost as horrified by the sight of our emaciated corpses, so that’s not really practical either.

What we need instead is a catch-and-release program for humans. Let’s get some man-sized humane traps, bait them with gourmet take-out meals or sleeping bags—that’s my expertise coming into play—and then release the trapped homeless people into environs from which they can’t make their ways back to Santa Monica. I’d suggest gang neighborhoods, Baghdad or Death Valley, but any place with predatory bipeds or fatal extremes of climate would do.

B- complains about the endless and costly studies of the problem, and I’m with him on that score too. The last study I read was entitled “Ending Homelessness in Santa Monica.” I’m willing, indeed eager, to work with B- on an actual program. We could call it “Ending the Homeless in Santa Monica”, or perhaps “The Final Solution”.

European tourists would love that.